The Joys that Await You in the Real World

Here’s my next article for the Observer. I can’t vouch for its quality, but I can vouch for the sleep deprivation and general hatred for the world I experienced while writing it.

Like most seniors, over half of my post-college plans depend on the acquisition of a winning lottery ticket or a superpower, preferably one that lets me shoot pinecones from my eyebrows. Surprisingly, this approach might not lead to the wild success I anticipated in the real world. Unlike the realm of the liberal arts college, which is founded upon the principles of humanism, activism, and botulism, the real world relies upon more tangible values, like job experience, networking skills, and botulism. Really, that last one is pretty universal. The only consolation I have from my long and fruitless collegiate career is that I’m hardly alone in my lack of preparation for the job market. For everyone who finds themselves on the cusp of graduation, here’s what to expect in the real world.

The first reality you need to prepare yourself for is the total absence of fun. If you smile in the real world, a bureaucrat is required by law to shoot a puppy. If you don’t believe me, just look it up. The policy is listed somewhere below the statute that requires you to become a vegetarian and drive a hybrid. Being an adult means always feeling guilty for killing something, regardless of if that killing comes in the form of environmental pollution or the puppy genocide you caused with your naturally cheerful disposition. Remember, it’s always sunny somewhere, and that somewhere is most likely covered in blood and puppy chunks.

Did you just smile at this picture? If so, both of these puppies are already dead. (Photo courtesy of http://www.bananabeltboats.com/images/puppies/More%201Puppies.jpg)

A second reality you need to prepare yourself for is soul-crushing poverty. Being repeatedly denied in one’s attempts to achieve gainful employment is considered a vocation in some parts of the world. You happen to live in one of them. The best you can hope for is to become part of the system by ruining the career aspirations of those around you. Agree to proofread a friend’s résumé. Then, in the section for hobbies and other interests, slyly slip in the phrase “serial rapist” or “twentieth-hijacker.” Then break his knee caps. For liability purposes, employers are only allowed to hire terrorists who have two working legs. Just be aware that your friends are planning to do the same thing to you – if they haven’t done it already. Check your knee caps and your status on the federal no-fly list just to be sure.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t reward idleness, so you’ll need to find a way to fill your many, many months of repeated employment rejections. It’s a good idea to be able to claim you’ve achieved something in your post-college years besides significant weight gain and a working knowledge of the language of the ants. Again, that’s not the type of story that will impress someone from the real world, which exists for the sole purpose of crushing your hopes, dreams, and charming anecdotes about breakthroughs in human-ant communication. Instead, fill the gaps in your résumé with lies about charitable activities you could have been doing instead of spending forty hours a week failing at job interviews. Two options that come to mind are building homes for the underprivileged and feeding vagrants to bears. Remember, the grander the lie, the better your chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for eliminating homelessness. The smaller the lie, the better your chances of winning a swift kick to the balls for being too much of a coward to defraud a prestigious international organization just to gain access to the open bar afterwards.

In the real world, unemployment benefits run out after five years, so at that point you’ll either find a job or join the vagrants in the bear pit. The bears won’t care how you dress, but your place of employment will. Men in the real world are expected to wear a shirt and tie at all times, even while sleeping in bed or swimming in a pool. It sends the message that you’re professional, but not quite professional enough to change your clothes because of something as trivial as getting your tie lodged in that grate at the bottom of the deep end. Besides, if you hold your breath long enough, all of the water will pretty much evaporate. The real-world dress code for those of the female persuasion is somewhat less fatal. Women are expected to wear comfortable shoes at all times. That way they’ll have excellent lower lumbar support for all the cupcake-baking and childbearing they’ll be doing every day for the rest of their lives. That might not be the life you envisioned for yourself, but it doesn’t matter; the world needs lots of babies to replace all of the professionals who get their ties stuck in pool grates.

Hoth is a fictional world, but like the real one, it’s cold, hostile, and filled with dead tauntauns. (Photo courtesy of http://www.obh.snafu.de/~madley/starwars/Hoth/battle_hoth.jpg)

Child rearing is another unavoidable fact of life in the real world. Even now, your mom and dad are bursting with joy at the thought that you will soon have a son or daughter of your own to make you as miserable as you made your parents. Whatever you do, don’t get clever and try to avoid offspring by not having sex. Mary tried that and look what happened to her. In the aftermath of the reproductive process, be sure to beat your children regularly. It won’t teach them a thing about discipline, but it will help keep your skills sharp for beating your wife. Besides, you’ll never become a champion boxer by not punching your perpetually pregnant spouse.

Don’t expect your life to get any better when you leave your house to go to work. The real world is a place of arcane office rituals dating back to the dawn of man. There was a time when gaining the respect of your peers required you to kill a lion with your bare hands. In today’s civilized office environment, all it takes to gain respect is a cursory understanding of sporting events and the ability to withstand scalding hot coffee applied directly to your testicles. What started out as a bet gone too far is now the standardized test for awarding promotions in most corporate settings. And no, you can’t kill a lion instead. You need the money from the testicle-burn promotion to cover the cost of your wife’s medical bills and all of the boxing gloves you keep wearing out on her. I’d recommend just using your bare fists, but it’s a bad idea to sacrifice the soft, girlish hands for which men in the real world are so admired.

Truth be told, the disheartening grind of the forty hour-work week will entirely eclipse domestic abuse, puppy shootings, and other occasional bright spots in your life. It might sound like a horrible existence, but it’s far better than the alternative of going to graduate school. The best way to describe education beyond the bachelor’s degree is as a sort of living death where you get both the crippling financial burdens of the real world and the crippling academic burdens of the college one. As an added bonus, all of your friends will move on with their lives, leaving you to toil away in your own personal hell of cigarettes, coffee, and gonorrhea. Sexually transmitted diseases are to graduate students like bears are to honey. Next time you should probably read that admissions brochure more carefully. The same goes for the place you decide to rent, which, if you’re like most graduate students, will be an unheated shanty in the Yukon you’ll share with a family of cougars. It’ll be one heck of a commute from there to your classes in eastern Pennsylvania, but at least it will save you fifty bucks a month in rent. On the plus side, you won’t have to wear a tie – at least not until you graduate again.

Contrary to what everyone else will tell you, life pretty much ends after you earn your undergraduate degree. No matter where you go or what you do, all that awaits you are wild animal attacks, rigid dress codes, and pile upon pile of dead puppies. For those hoping to avoid this fate, there are few options. Failing your senior year isn’t such a bad idea. Neither is sending a letter of warning to your local animal shelter.

Animal Abuse as a Sport

This is another summer e-mail from late high school. It’s nice to see that four years of college have made no noticeable impact on the way I write. I’m sure the ability to completely avoid self-improvement is a valuable skill in the real world.

What’s the next great sport of our time? No, it’s not lacrosse, rugby, or the class action lawsuit. It’s not even the hit-and-run accident. Instead, the next great sport of out time involves head-to-head competition between the most graceful but fierce class of animals in existence: rodents. That’s right; the sport of rodent racing has finally made its way to Dashville. While I was out running the other day, I saw a crowd gathered around a small race track. “Surly that can’t be the sport I’ve heard so much about on ESPN,” I said to myself. But, much to my delight, it was. Unfortunately, I was not very successful at blending into the small, hamster-wielding crowd. As I stood there, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily from the run I had temporarily abandoned, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat out of place, being about two feet taller and ten years older than the average race enthusiast. Plus, I didn’t have a hamster. I think I can safely say that that is the most inadequate I have ever felt in the area of hamster possession.

I couldn’t stay for the entire spectacle because rodent racing is actually a long and arduous ordeal. I guess you can’t rush the good things in life. The race that I did see part of involved two hamsters named Squeaky and Speedy. Speedy took off to an early lead but then returned to the starting line because hamsters are inherently confused and uncompetitive. Squeaky, on the other hand, didn’t move at all. The girl that owned him picked up the hamster and said something like, “Awww, he’s sleeping.” In actuality, he was probably dead. The rodents were racing in poorly ventilated plastic balls when it was 85 degrees outside. That’s hot enough to make the average hamster burst into flames. Add to that the fact that this hamster had obviously not been training properly, and you have an excellent recipe for hamster death. Okay, maybe it wasn’t dead, but either way, the burning lump of hamster mass that the girl held in her hands was not a healthy rodent.

Not all the rodents were hamsters. There was a guinea pig, a ferret, and several varieties of smaller hamsters, which are somehow a different species from regular hamster. In the beginning, the animals were mainly racing their own kind, but I’m confident that the ferret would eventually take on a hamster. It would be like David versus Goliath, if David and Goliath had raced in plastic balls and if Goliath had been a ferret. One animal that was noticeably absent from the races was the ground hog. Thanks to some regulatory organization or another, purchasing ground hogs is now illegal because several specimens have been found to carry monkey pox. I know, I know, I was shocked, too. Who knew that it was ever possible to buy ground hogs? I suspect that they come in dozens like eggs, only with more fur and more monkey pox. This whole situation is ridiculous because the spread of monkey pox could easily have been prevented. As I always say, if you’re going to hump a monkey, use protection. You might claim that I fail – or, more accurately, refuse – to understand what monkey pox actually is, but I think that the problem goes much deeper. I blame a society that has somehow found it acceptable to let ground hogs and monkeys intermingle. Back in my day – which was last Tuesday – we kept our animals segregated, and rightfully so. Once you let them associate with one another, they start demanding rights, holding sit-ins, and boycotting buses. Before you know it, you’re using fire hoses to subdue crowds of socially conscious monkeys and ground hogs on the streets of Birmingham, and then Jesse Jackson gets involved. And that’s when there’s nothing left to do but move to Canada.

Vatican III: Making Catholicism Cool Again

The Catholic Church needs to modernize to stay competitive in today’s spiritual marketplace. Right now, uppity Protestant sects are winning the race for converts with their dancing bears, naked Frisbee golf, and LSD-induced orgies. It’s a good time to be a Quaker. Back in the 1970s, the Catholic Church tried to fight back against these practices with Vatican II, a radical council that allowed priests to say Mass in the vernacular and wear parachute pants during Lent. Such gimmicks are no longer effective in today’s complex society, which harbors an intense hatred for baggy pants and spoken English. That’s why I plan to get the church back in the game with Vatican III. It will be similar to Vatican II, only updated to take into account new realities like hip-hop, the internet, and Jesus 2.0. He’s just like regular Jesus, only his name is Mario Andretti and he rides a stegosaurus. It’s these sorts of subtle changes that will help the post-Vatican III Catholic Church finally crush Protestants, Jews, and the ever-troublesome Jedi.

Bears and Protestants make great dance partners because both lack souls. It’s kind of cute that non-Catholics try to dance on two feet just like real humans. (Photo courtesy of http://www.ericclaridge.com/Resources/dancingbear.jpeg)

Predictably, Vatican III will work a bit differently than other church councils. First, the cardinals will get drunk and shoot bottle rockets at each other. Next, the Sistine Chapel will mysteriously burn down. Finally, the cardinals will buy more booze and bottle rockets. Somewhere in the process, a document of unparalleled theological importance will be produced and the pope will lose an eye. That’s pretty much how the other Vatican Councils went, as well, which is the main reason cardinals are usually sworn to secrecy. The document produced through this time-tested method will be three hundred words long and will be written entirely in permanent marker on someone’s face. Two hundred and fifty of those words will actually be crude drawings, but at least everyone will finally understand how Cardinal Penis got his nickname.

After the novelty of Cardinal Penis has worn off, which admittedly could be several years, the Church will realize that the remaining fifty words of the three-hundred-word document contain orders for subtle but important changes to the basic tenets of the Catholic faith. First and foremost, the seven sacraments will be reduced to three: Baptism, Confirmation, and waffles. Even the godless Protestants will celebrate waffles, but they’ll do it without the blessing of St. Jemima. The two remaining sacraments will be very different than they are today. Baptism will involve a Slip ‘N Slide and the liberal consumption of Jack Daniels. Confirmation will involve an eight-digit code to make sure you’re not a spambot. This will finally bring the sacrament into line with the teachings of St. Paul and his first letter from a rich prince in Nigeria, which teaches that salvation requires a valid e-mail address and large money orders made out to people you’ve never met.

Vatican III will also make some minor changes to the groups eligible for salvation. Dogs will be allowed into heaven. Alabamans won’t. It’s a fair trade if you think about it. Additionally, the poor and oppressed won’t be the shoe-ins for salvation they once thought themselves to be. Jesus makes this clear in an often overlooked passage in the Gospel of Luke: “And then Jesus said unto the poor, ‘Take a shower and get a job, for God needs a richer and better-smelling tax base if he’s ever going to finish his palace made entirely of racecars and naked women.’ But the poor were unmoved, so Jesus fed them to his mighty stegosaurus, who suffered from indigestion for seven times seventy minutes before taking a mighty dump behind a bush.” For everyone who just thought to themselves, “Wait a minute, stegosauruses are herbivores,” I remind you that Jesus is the son of God and can feed his dinosaur whatever he wants. Also, kudos for not caring about the poor. It’s exactly this kind of sentiment that will allow Catholicism 3.0 to bring the Church back into alignment with Jesus’s original intention to use the downtrodden as a supplemental food source for prehistoric animals.

Jesus smirks as he prepares to feed another batch of children to a nearby dinosaur. (Photo courtesy of http://www.cob-net.org/cards/jesus-4kids250.jpg)

Mass will also work a little differently after Vatican III. In the current post-Vatican II world, I’ve been to Mass once a week for the past 21 years and have yet to meet God. You’d think he’d show up just once and be like, “Hey, thanks for coming over. Make yourself at home. Chips and salsa are on the table.” That’s another problem with church: a critical shortage of Mexican snack foods. Catholicism 3.0 will correct all of these shortcomings. Under the new system, if God doesn’t show up, he’ll be forced to pay a fine and serve a one-week suspension. It’s unlikely that he’ll miss a Mass, though, because the service will be moved to a more convenient day. When God picked Sunday to be the Sabbath, he failed to take into account how hard it is to wake up after smoking fifteen pounds of pot Saturday night. That’s why Sunday Mass will be moved to Thursday afternoon. It won’t be too much of an inconvenience for people’s weekday schedules since all you’ll have to do is show up, get your card punched, and maybe eat some chips and salsa. Alternately, if you don’t feel like lugging around a punch card, you can just show up at church, give God a high-five, and then head out the door.

It might sound like the high-five approach would make you look bad in the eyes of God. After Vatican III, you’ll know for sure since God will be forced to disclose what he knows about you under the Freedom of Information Act. Catholicism 3.0 will allow you to check your salvation status just like you would your credit score or criminal record. Now you won’t have to wonder whether or not he gave you credit for helping that old woman cross the street or detracted points for that time you accidentally nuked Bolivia. The salvation score check will let you know the old woman incident gave you two points while the Bolivia incident only cost you one, mainly because Bolivia is full of poor people who fail to contribute to God’s racecar and naked woman palace.

After Vatican III, there’s a good chance God won’t know about your sins in the first place thanks to recent changes in Congress. Everyone knows the Democrats hate warrantless surveillance in general and God in particular. They’ve had it in for him ever since he sided with Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Thanks to the Democrats’ heroic disregard for basic religious freedoms, God will be bound by the Constitution just like the rest of us. This makes sense because if Catholicism 3.0 teaches anything, it’s that the true God is the God of America and maybe a few of the southern parts of Canada.

Contrary to common belief, God’s blessing guarantees impeccable hair, not victory. Other people who lost despite God’s support include Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and the Nazis. (Photo courtesy of http://news.boisestate.edu/newsrelease/archive/2003/032003/ralph_nader.jpg)

Vatican III will make other provisions to make God a more dependable bureaucrat. One of the most important rules of Catholicism 3.0 is that God must grant or deny all prayer requests in written form. Now when some professional football player says, “I’d like to thank Jesus for this win,” a reporter can do a quick audit and respond, “Actually, Jesus denied your prayer request for a victory, but he did grant somebody else’s request that you get viciously mauled by a pony.” In short, the God of Catholicism 3.0 functions like a lottery ticket, only he’s free, reusable, and incredibly vindictive. You might not win every time, but you can be sure that someone somewhere else did, and with any luck they were also praying for vicious pony maulings.

Given the drastic improvements guaranteed by Catholicism 3.0, I plan to kick off Vatican III sometime next week. It will start by Friday at the latest assuming I can assemble enough bottle rockets and keep the meddling Jedi away.